I’m not going to spend a lot of time beating around the bush here. I like to cook, and I want to get better at it. As a challenge to myself, I’m going to be cooking my way through Amanda Hesser’s The Essential New York Times Cookbook. With over 1,000 pages and 18 categories of recipes, the book provides a timeline of the history of food, and each recipe includes some historical context describing the origins of the recipe. Recipes range from simple comfort foods designed to please families to elevated dishes from various types of cuisines. I had a tough time narrowing down the first recipe I wanted to try my hand at, so I opened the book to a random page and chose from there. That recipe was the Luxury Chicken Potpies. This turned out to be a great starting point, as I’ve made a few different versions of chicken pot pie in the past, so it wasn’t a completely new concept to me. Overall, they turned out pretty well. After making the recipe as it appears in the book (with the exception of the sherry…instead, I substituted apple cider vinegar), there are a few things I would do differently next time, which I’ll describe below.

I will say, I do wish the book would include an overall estimate of time required for each recipe. The New York Times website does include time estimates, but it would be nice to have that information included in the book as well. The recipe on the website estimates 1 hour and 45 minutes total. Because I was working slowly and deliberately (and stopping for photos along the way), it took me about two hours to get everything ready to go in the oven. I also prepped the potpies earlier in the day, refrigerated them, and put them in the oven at dinnertime. Overall, it took 2 hours of prep time and about 35-40 minutes for baking.

Ingredients

Yield: 6 servings

• 1½ pounds boneless, skinless chicken breast
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• ½ pound red potatoes (about 3 small), cut into ⅓-inch dice
• 8 baby carrots, peeled and halved lengthwise
• ½ cup fresh shelled peas
• ¼ pound baby patty-pan squash, halved
• ¼ pound baby zucchini
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 6 tablespoons flour
• 1¼ cups milk
• ¾ cup heavy cream, or another cup milk
• 4 drops Tabasco sauce
• 2 tablespoons sherry
• 2 tablespoons mixed herbs (parsley, chives, thyme)
• 1 pound frozen puff pastry, thawed
• 1 egg, lightly beaten

I don’t always do this when I cook, but I pulled all of the ingredients out before starting. The recipe calls for the puff pastry to be thawed, so I left it in the box to thaw while I got started. In retrospect, I should have left it in the freezer and pulled it out right before needing it. As it thawed, it became more difficult to unwrap so I could roll it all out, as the two sheets softened and stuck together.

1. Step one calls for boiling the chicken breast in the chicken stock until cooked through, approximately 15 to 20 minutes. After the chicken is cooked, remove the chicken and set the stock aside. In the future, I will probably opt to season the chicken and bake it, or cook it in the Instant Pot and shred it. Regardless, next time I will be seasoning the chicken with a poultry seasoning blend or an Italian seasoning blend. I felt as though the chicken lacked flavor in the final product.
2. While the chicken was boiling, I chopped my potatoes and onions and got them in a large skillet with some butter to start softening. As those were cooking, I chopped the yellow squash and zucchini. Because I wasn’t able to find baby zucchini or pattypan squash, I chopped regular yellow squash and zucchini into larger chunks, pictured below. I added the squash, zucchini, frozen peas, and sliced baby carrots to the pan and seasoned the mixture with salt and pepper.

3. As the veggies were cooking, I moved onto the cream sauce. The melted butter and flour cooked for about a minute before I added the reserved chicken broth, the milk, and the heavy cream. While that was coming to a boil, I chopped the herbs–parsley, thyme, and chives. Next time, I will add more flour to the sauce so it will thicken more. While the potpies baked in the oven, the squash and zucchini put out more water into the sauce, which thinned it out quite a bit. I was a bit heavy-handed with the thyme, so that flavor was pretty overwhelming. I will probably cut back on that next time, while also adding a few other seasonings to taste…I’m thinking garlic powder, onion powder, and a dash of chipotle chili powder to better balance out the sweetness of the cream.

4. Next, I chopped up the chicken, adding it and the vegetable mixture to the cream sauce. The mixture divvied up perfectly into these 20-ounce oven-safe bowls that I found on Amazon.

5. As I mentioned earlier, I struggled with the puff pastry a bit. I should have removed it from the package and unrolled it while it was still frozen, allowing it to thaw while it was flattened to prevent the sheets from sticking to one another. Once I got the two sheets separated, there wasn’t a whole lot that I needed to do to the puff pastry other than trace the outline of an extra bowl I had and loosely cut each circle out. I was able to get three puff pastry circles from each sheet, with plenty of scraps left over that could have been rolled out and turned into something else.

6. At this point, I popped the bowls in the fridge for a couple of hours until I was ready to bake them. I let them sit out on the counter while the oven was preheating, and they ended up baking for about 35 minutes–10 minutes longer than the original recipe called for because they were still a little chilled when they went into the oven.

All in all, they were a hit! The puff pastry top was buttery and flaky, complimenting the creamy sweetness of the sauce nicely. It was an easy recipe to follow, very hearty and filling, perfect for a chilly fall night.